Picture this. A black British drag artist, all decked out in a blond wig, high heels, pink tights and a tutu, takes a curtain call at the Bayreuth festival and is vigorously booed – and later horribly trolled – by the so-called Wagnerian ultras in an exclusive black-tie audience that includes the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, herself.
This is not fake news or some invented nightmare hallucination. On the contrary, such an event actually took place last week at Richard Wagner’s own theatre in Bavaria, where lovers of the composer flock each summer to hear his works at what is without question the most written about opera festival of them all.
The object of the booing and trolling was the Brighton-based performer Le Gateau Chocolat at the end of a new production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. His hostile reception duly made headlines around the world. One report solemnly opined: “It is thought to be the first time that the opera festival … has featured a drag act.”
Actually it isn’t, as anyone who saw Stefan Herheim’s production of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth a decade or so ago could confirm. On that occasion, the outcast Klingsor, who has castrated himself in order to prove himself more powerful than the Arthurian knights of the Holy Grail, took to the stage in a peroxide blond wig and black stockings.
But that’s not the main point here. The main point here that provoking is what Bayreuth does. It is one of the most trusted and predictable rituals of the annual Wagner festival that it will begin with a new production that does its best to offend the operatic conservatives , an objective that it normally accomplishes with ease, just as Tobias Kratzer’s Tannhäuser did last week.
Six years ago, I sat in the Bayreuth theatre and heard booing and anger the like of which I have never heard in any opera house, even in Germany, where they like a good boo. Back then, it was directed against the Ring Cycle director Frank Castorf, who had successfully got up the noses of the Wagnerians with a production set in the Caspian oilfields and a Californian motel that included crocodiles, and vast Mount Rushmore-style busts of Marx, Lenin and Mao.
What happens next was another essential part of the Bayreuth ritual. The world’s press reports the scandal in eye-catching stories. I have done it myself for the Guardian.
The stories tend to cite the loud booing as part of the crisis of Germany’s Regietheater – director’s theatre – in which the composer’s wishes are ignored in favour of a politically radical Konzept which reveals (or not) what the work is really about. A few incautious reviewers sometimes go further, by implying that the booing means that the dark conservative and racist forces with which Bayreuth was so appallingly complicit during the Third Reich are still alive and well.
In my limited Bayreuth experience, the contentious productions often get booed because they are not very good, rather than because they are shocking. And it is worth bearing in mind Wagner’s own wishesand his works, many of which, notably Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, embody the same tension between the old and the new that exploded at Le Gateau Chocolat’s curtain call.
“Do something new,” was what Wagner told his acolytes in 1882, as he prepared the world premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth. Doing something new has been the motto of postwar Bayreuth since, more or less purged of its Nazi associations, it reopened in 1951. It was this approach that lay behind the whole New Bayreuth school of production that saw the arrival of the African-American Grace Bumbry as the first black singer at the festival when she played Venus, also in Tannhäuser, nearly 60 years ago in 1961. That, too, was regarded as shocking in its day.
Bayreuth’s obsession with provocation has become a cliche now. In the end, though, the festival depends on whether the productions, the singing and the playing are any good or not. Standards have varied over the years. But this year, for all the furore, the Daily Telegraph opera critic Mark Ronan awarded the new Tannhäuser five stars, stating that it was “an exhilarating production that was full of verve and on opening night … was received, deservedly, with a standing ovation.” Sorry to spoil a good story.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist